THIRSTY INTERVIEWS SCREAMERS DIRECTOR CARLA GARAPEDIAN
Michael Lara
Stay Thirsty Media
July 11 2008
IL
"And when they come to ethnically cleanse me, will you speak out? Will
you defend me?" Laid out back in 1994, Pop Will Eat Itself’s
marching call for action "Ich Bin Ein Auslander" reflected their
awareness and anger at the rise of the right in Europe while nation
states, by in large, were unresponsive to these troubling turns in
humanity. Likewise, many are quick to acknowledge its roots to Hitler,
but most fail to recognize that long before the Holocaust, the first
genocide of the 20th century occurred in the former Ottoman Empire
(now Turkey). Beginning in 1915, between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000
Armenians perished while the world did nothing, despite diplomats and
journalists recognizing its occurrence. Such is the case of former
US Ambassador to The Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau whose critical
overtures were silenced by "national interests."
Addressing this forgotten and/or marginalized dark chapter in
history before all survivors of the Armenian Genocide disappear,
Dr. Carla Garapedian alongside fellow Armenian-Americans, System
Of A Down, coalesced their passions, skills, histories as well as
with others to produce a much needed supplemental material for all
curriculums. Whether disseminated on the street, at home or in a
school, her 2006 documentary Screamers shows the repeating machinations
of atrocities realized when a government turns on a certain segment
of its populace.
In Tokyo for the Japanese premiere of her film at the burgeoning 3rd
Annual Refugee Film Festival, Dr. Garapedian divulged much about her
experience in witnessing the ingredients of this repeating sickness
within our world underway and of ways to face it as it continues in
Darfur and elsewhere shared alongside RFF Director Kirill Konin:
Thirsty: Well, thank you for your time this day and for being a part
of the UNHRC’S 3rd Annual Refugee Film Festival.
Dr. Garapedian: It’s my pleasure (warm smile).
Thirsty: And you know, just as when something horrible happens, you
always look for what’s survived…and after a fire entirely wiped
out my house in Kamakura, this tile survived. Please take a closer
look at it…
Dr. Garapedian: Okay (studying it)…
Thirsty: Look on the back of it.
Dr. Garapedian: Oh cool… Wow, "Made In Occupied Japan."
Thirsty: Yes, however, when I told one of my close Japanese friends
about this, he said, "Japan was never occupied." And I didn’t know
what to say. It was a really uncomfortable…
Dr. Garapedian: Moment.
Thirsty: Exactly. So, like a part of genocide and anything else that’s
evil, what fuels it?
Dr. Garapedian: That’s a very good question… I think part of what
fuels denial is a political culture and um, we have a political
culture of not only denial, but also appeasement of denial. So,
it’s a two-sided thing. So, in the case of Turkey, the denial is
institutionalized: The educational system is institutionalized. In
the case of government, every ministry is part of the denial. Um,
and so people in their hearts and minds actually believe it didn’t
happen. And if it did happen, it was something else. Then on the
other side of it, you have the United States and Europe, a belief
that we will never let it happen, never again. That slogan after the
Holocaust and yet we have allowed genocides to continue through the
20th century over and over again.
Thirsty: Why is that?
Dr. Garapedian: I think… Well, it’s a complicated question actually,
but what got me interested in making film was Samantha Power. She
wrote this book called A Problem From Hell: America In The Age Of
Genocide. It won a Pulitzer Prize and got the attention from people
around the world. And she did propose this radical thesis that we
allow it because we really don’t want to intervene. We basically
have a policy of non-intervention in the face of genocide. We say we
want to stop it. We actually don’t want to stop it. Some of reasons
are geopolitical, we don’t want to offend people that could help
us in the world so in the case of Turkey, we didn’t want to offend
them for they could help us against the Soviets. Even before that,
Bolshevism. And in our film, we have a person argue it’s a case we
cannot identify it. And with Bosnia, it was one of the best examples
how television brought into the living rooms of ordinary people that
an genocide was happening and they could identify with these people
because they looked very Western and some of them spoke English.
Thirsty: It’s like Argentina where many are fair-skinned and you just
would never know.
Dr. Garapedian: Yes, that’s true. Part of the problem of not stopping
genocide is that if you cannot identify with the people who are being
killed or victims, you don’t see them as potentially your father
or mother, your child, your sister, then you don’t feel the moral
obligation to do something about it. So that’s been a real problem,
but general speaking with what Samantha Power argues that I also
believe in is that our governments, whether they be Republican or
Democrat, on the left or the right, have not wanted to intervene
in the last 100 years. And the reason we call it ‘Screamers’ is
that she (Power) identified ‘Screamers’ as people who see what’s
happening on the ground. Even during the Holocaust, we had people
reporting what they saw on the ground. This is going on. This is going
on. We got to do something about it. In Cambodia, same thing… In
Bosnia, same thing… Rwanda. And in the Armenian Genocide, we had
American diplomats on the ground reporting. It’s on the record. Other
missionaries and diplomats is on the record. The problem is not that
we don’t know what’s going on. We just don’t take that information
and feel that absolute obligation to do something about it.
Thirsty: So what makes someone go to that next level?
Dr. Garapedian: If, I think it’s two things. If you have
politicians being silent, you have that problem. They don’t want
to intervene. They’re not going to want to talk about it. The Bush
Administration had begun to start to talk about it Darfur now, but
they started talking about it in 2004. It called it genocide, but
have they done anything about it? Um, when politicians are silent,
unfortunately, um, unless you have a public media like the BBC in
Britain whom I’ve worked for, most media will follow the agenda
set of foreign policy by politicians. If politicians aren’t talking
about, then in a commercial media world, you’re not going to have
journalists covering that genocide. And also, it is very expensive
to cover genocide. In the case of Sudan, you have to send a crew
there. You have to get in the country. The government will make you
sit around in Khartoum for a couple of weeks and…
Thirsty: And the visas will take forever of course.
Dr. Garapedian: You then get to a refugee camp and you hang around in
a refugee camp and you get news of something happening and you manage
somehow to get to that place. And by the time you get there, in the
case of Darfur, they burn villages. You’ll see burning embers. So to
actually show the bodies, the proof of genocide or ethnic cleansing
or whatever it may be, it’s actually very difficult to show those
pictures. So to build a mass of public opinion we find this in
many charitable organizations and I hate to use that word charitable
organizations. You know, the United Nations has its problem in raising
awareness of whatever problem. UNHCR probably does too. How do we
get people to feel something? You need to see the pictures. If you
don’t have the journalist getting the pictures, you have a problem.
Thirsty: I understand. I used to work for the United Nations’ FAO
organization. The Food and Agricultural Organization is actually the
largest agency within the UN and there’s just a lot of bunched up
bureaucracy. Well intentioned, but… I would call Darfur and all
these places.
Dr. Garapedian: Even the BBC, funded on public money…
Thirsty: Yeah.
Dr. Garapedian: You don’t have to make a case for a program on
Africa. You won’t have someone saying to you, "We’re not sure where
the public knows where that country is and we’re not so sure to do
something about it?" That’s some sort of argument you’ll get from
an American network. "Ah, we don’t know." So, the BBC is completely
opposite, publicly funded. But even they have their limits. They’re
going to send crews out there and hang out for so long. They’ve made
at least 4 documentaries on Darfur since 2004. So people know about
it. But then the question comes, what is our government going to
do something about it? And there you are looking for international
leadership. They’re saying let’s leave it to the United Nations
to do something or it’s an African problem. Let’s let the African
countries do something about it. Genocide… You don’t feel strongly
about your leadership???
Thirsty: Within that, it’s Obama and McCain now and I’m just assuming,
rightly I think, that Obama will win and he will make history, but he
is inheriting… Well, I have been in and outside Japan over the past
8 years and I have seen our world standing just go down and down and
down and down. It’s tough. I have a lot of German and French friends,
etc., but there’s a lot of homework to be done. It’s been piling up.
Dr. Garapedian: Yes. It’s interesting. Well, I heard it in Hillary’s
campaign and Obama’s and it’s now kind of hip to say, "What are we
going to do about Darfur?" And what I have been trying to say in
traveling with Screamers, if there’s not one issue in our generation,
obviously the environment is critical, but genocide seems to me that
it is a test to who we are in our civilization in our generation so
somehow we have to find a way to stop this pattern of behavior. And
I have also met some people who have been studying the pattern of
run up to genocide and who are studying the similarities between all
of the genocides in the last 100 years, so looking at the 10 years
preceding genocide. And if we know what the pattern is, maybe we can
intervene sooner.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
